Last week Joomla announced its latest version, 2.5, with what it called multi-database support, natural language search and notifications when updates to Joomla or an extension are available.

For now, as Apoorv Durga writes on the Real Story blog, the database compatibility is limited to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) SQL Server with Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) support said to be coming down the road.

The automatic notification system, which WordPress has been providing forever, gives you a message when updates are available. This is not exactly an earth-shattering addition, but I'm sure it will be welcome by site administrators who up to now had to read about updates on sites like this one.

The search capability is off by default, but you can turn it on and have a search tool available across a site, which I'm sure will be a welcome addition by users and administrators alike.

Durga points out that these moves do help in establishing Joomla as a more solid enterprise web content management choice, but he says to some extent, it's going to depend on the developers who create plug-ins for the Joomla open source system to implement these changes and provide access across to the system.

In spite of Durga's critique, Joomla is an extremely popular open source web content management system with over 1.6 million installations including large enterprise and government customers like Citibank, eBay, General Electric, Harvard University, Ikea, McDonald's, Sony and many large nations. Joomla claims it's running 2.7 percent of the world's websites.

For more information:
- see the Joomla press release

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